Customerland
Customerland is a podcast about …. Customers. How to get more of them. How to keep them. What makes them tick. We talk to the experts, the technologies and occasionally, actual people – you know, customers – to find out what they’re all about.So if you’re a CX pro, a loyalty marketer, a brand owner, an agency planner … if you’re a CRM & personalization geek, if you’re a customer service / CSAT / NPS nerd – you finally have a home.
Customerland
Peak Immersion: The Science Behind Engaged Store Associates
The hidden science behind retail success isn't found in flashy technology or complicated loyalty programs – it's in the power of engaged store associates. This conversation with Nikki Baird, VP of Strategy and Product at Aptos, reveals groundbreaking research showing that when employees reach "peak immersion" during customer interactions, sales naturally increase.
Retailers have become addicted to digital metrics, treating them like donuts that provide a quick sugar rush of data, while neglecting the apple-like sustenance of in-store metrics that require more effort to digest but provide better nourishment. This misplaced focus leads to investments in technologies that work around store associates rather than empowering them.
Nikki challenges conventional thinking about loyalty programs, explaining that true customer devotion stems from consistency paired with unexpected moments of delight – elements best delivered through human connections. When customers choose physical stores over online shopping, they're implicitly seeking the option of human assistance, even if they don't actively engage with associates during every visit.
The most revealing insight comes from a perfume kiosk case study where technology designed to work independently of associates ultimately failed because it didn't consider their crucial role in the customer journey. The message is clear: successful retail experiences must serve all stakeholders – executives, customers, and especially frontline staff.
Have you been overlooking your most valuable retail asset? Listen now to discover why your competitive advantage isn't found in technology alone, but in the humans who bring your brand to life. Share your thoughts on how you're empowering your associates to create exceptional experiences!
You should not be thinking about store experiences in terms of how to get around the store associate, or you should not consider in-store experiences that do not include consideration of the store associate and the role that they ultimately will play in delivering that experience. Because even if you think like, oh, I'm going to put a kiosk in the store and it's going to be self-serve, so I don't need store associates aren't a part of this experience, I don't need to worry about them, I'm just going to have this kiosk. Well, when the kiosk doesn't work, who's the first person they turn to to ask like, hey, what's wrong with the kiosk?
Speaker 2:Today on Customer Land, Nikki Baird, who is VP of Strategy and Product at Aptos, but also kind of retail personality.
Speaker 1:Personality. That's a new one.
Speaker 2:And I mean that in the best possible way. I mean you have a lot to say. People pay attention to your opinions and your guidance, so perhaps there's a better way of describing you than that. In fact, best thing for me to do is just let you describe what you do at Aptos and thank you for being here.
Speaker 1:Ah well, thank you for having me. So I am the VP of strategy and product at Aptos, and the way I usually characterize that is I look after the future, so I interpret that future for our customers so that they can make good decisions about where technology can potentially lead them, and I look after the future of our products so that we can make the right investments to help them get to that ultimate future. And I do happen to share some of my thinking about that future along the way, which is which is where I think I get the reputation that I have and that I am grateful for, and thank you for the kind words.
Speaker 2:Well, of course. So you know that that newsletter that you put out, I'm a huge fan of it. Um, it's always insightful, always, and there's so much just junk out there. I know that when I'm opening that one up, I'm going to actually get stuff that I needed to hear.
Speaker 1:Oh, thank you. I really appreciate that because I'm sort of throwing darts into the dark. So anytime I get feedback there, I absolutely appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Well, no, it's, it's a real thing. So so one of the things you wrote about recently, um, was kind of a takeoff on, I think, a small flurry of articles and other media that all had to do with like how crummy in-store experiences are and why and I thought your takes plural on that were really interesting and and smart. So, um, I should stop editorializing, right. So the smart thing to do here is is to just kind of I want to put these out to you and just let you elaborate on them, if that's okay.
Speaker 2:Okay that sounds like a plan so, um, let's see how do we best frame this up. You highlight it like one of the things you said was that engaged store associates engaged, I'm going to underline that word engaged have a beneficial impact on customer engagement, loyalty and sales. Can you kind of explain and there was, there was a term there, I don't recall, but you know um, anyway, you had immersion, it was there you go.
Speaker 1:I don't know if I've been peak immersed in anything but anything I know Well, yeah. So, uh, I am a magpie when it comes to what other people write in the retail space, and this one came from the frontiers in neuroscience. So, uh, except for my exceptional Google alerts, I don't know that I ever would have found it otherwise. But this group of researchers did a study at a luxury retailer at two different locations, so it's a very small sample size. I have to keep that in mind.
Speaker 1:But they basically measured brain flow or something about kind of that flow state. Right? Everybody talks about wanting to be in that flow state where everything is clicking and everything is going really well. That, I think, is another definition of peak immersion. And they measured that state in employees as they were interacting with customers, and then afterwards they looked at what was the result of that interaction in terms of customer sales or any other kind of metrics that they could gather from that, and they found that the more often that a store employee was engaged in that peak immersion or flow state when they were interacting with the customer, that the more they sold, which is sort of like gosh.
Speaker 1:I wonder if somebody who's feeling like everything's clicking and going great in their job, that they're going to be really successful at that job. That sounds kind of like a duh moment, but also it's something that in retail and in stores I don't think that people have really tried to measure. We have lots of assumptions about how a store associate helps store sales, but nobody's really ever tried to measure it before. So good on these researchers for doing so.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's kind of too bad that it appeared in some obscure journal that only appears in your feed, because it's yeah, yes, but that's a really big deal. I mean, everybody talks about EX as one of the most important components to CX, which has all kinds of other effects down the line, but I don't know, like you, that I've ever seen that kind of put in those data-driven terms, even though it was a small sample size.
Speaker 1:Yeah, totally Well. Maybe the big question is why? Why aren't retailers really getting it? I'm doing air quotes here on store operations execution it was called store perform doesn't exist anymore.
Speaker 1:But we worked with borders at the time the booksellers and they had done this really great study on the amount of time that an employee spends with a customer when they're in the store, and they found that there's there is a peak, there's an optimal amount of time to spend. So if you're not spending enough time then you won't be successful. But if you're spending too much time, then you're ignoring other stores or other customers who and then also you will not be successful in that way. So they were like the peak amount of time that a store associate should spend with a boarder's customer is six minutes. They like quantified it and then they used that math to justify their staffing levels. So they said, if we have this much foot traffic coming into a store in this hour and we want every customer to get six minutes of a store associates time, we must therefore staff this many people in order to make sure that every customer gets their six minutes. No more, no less. Six minutes.
Speaker 1:So like again, when I saw that study, I was like nobody ever does this and I think some of it is mythology right, it's. It's just, store associates is a sunk cost I have to pay it because I have to have people in there in order to keep the door open and and others that you know. There's not a whole lot of magic in what a store associate does. I think that's another corporate myth that anybody can do this and you don't need training and they're cogs in the wheel and can be replaced at any point in time, and I think there's certainly enough evidence out there, if you look for it, to prove that wrong.
Speaker 2:You know I was thinking about the kind of dimensionality of that idea. You know, if it's a six minute moment, you know, great, okay, you spent six minutes with your customer. Was that really optimized for the rest of the kind of engagement, what did it do? I mean, okay, did you get the transaction? And how does that get measured out? And I think it kind of. It brought me to what I think is one of the most interesting parts of your more recent piece was the idea that there's good metrics and then there's great metrics, there's useful and there's useless, there's ornamental metrics and then there's, you know, stuff we have to say to our bosses. But you know you talk about a kind of over-reliance on the digital performance metrics and how that really works out in the real world.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, you know, e-commerce is a very rich environment for gathering data points Now I said it that way and not gathering insights. Right, because that is not a foregone conclusion, because you gather data points does not mean you have insights, but you can gather a lot of data online that you can't gather in store. So I think to that earlier question of why don't retailers pay more attention to this Well, it is really hard to measure. It's very challenging to measure. I mean I can't even I did not read that Frontiers in Neuroscience article to the level of depth to understand exactly how they were measuring this peak immersion, like if people were walking around with foil caps on or whatever.
Speaker 2:Like colander yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but it had to have been somewhat invasive, like I don't think you can do that remotely. So there's that. And so, because you have all of this data and you can make yourself feel like you're getting a lot of insights, there is, I think, a bias and a feeling that you have better quality and I've got my air quotes going data that comes from online and you've got a big black box. I know people go in and I know I put labor and inventory in and sales come out, but everything else that happens in there, I have no idea what happened to make any of those things happen, I think. I think that's the, that's the challenge.
Speaker 1:So for me, I think I use the analogy of the donut versus the apple. The donut is the sugar rush of these easy data metrics for online, and the apple is the. You know you got to work harder, you got to digest it. You got to eat a lot more before you get the same number of calories. Like it's a it's. It's a bit more effort to get that.
Speaker 2:And yeah, it kind of makes me wonder, like because you see this in action, real time, every day on the marketplace and it's like you. I think that like, first of all, I agree with that point, but what do you think's behind it? Is it just too easy to focus on the easy metrics? Is it, you know, because there's so much dimensionality, as I mentioned before, in the real ones?
Speaker 1:It is easy.
Speaker 1:It also, for a long time, was easy to get a measurable return on the investment for online. So I would find in the discussions before the pandemic why would I give you a million dollars in software for my stores when I could put that into online and I can get a 20% return within three months? Right, like the growth of online was such that it was really. It really was like am I going to open a store or I'm going to put this money online? I'm going to put it online because I'm going to get that return right away, and I think a lot of those underlying costs have changed very fundamentally and we do see a lot more awareness of a dollar spent online isn't going to get me the same return that it used to, and everything that I can potentially invest in is harder to get the return. So now it's more of a level playing field. Well, do I invest this dollar in stores or do I invest this dollar online? And the answer is starting to be no. I need more on the storefront than I do online.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's a lot more parity now in terms of what you get back out of that same dollar put somewhere.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Interesting. You know, in this space, on our side of things, I probably spend a little too much time complaining about the problems with loyalty. It's really easy to do, yes, yes, it is really smart people that work in that space doing doing really interesting work. But still, you know, come on. I mean just come on Right, and yet I will. I loved your. Take that. Like you, you took it from the other side, the much better side, that said, let's talk about what's really working in loyalty and so maybe you could just kind of expand on that a little bit, on that a little bit, yeah.
Speaker 1:So I mean, I think, the things that focus on experience and the things that focus on, I guess, loyalty. Let me flip it, I'm going to use I'm sorry, I'm going to use a Star Wars analogy. So you know, they say that fear leads to anger, leads to the dark side, right? Well, in loyalty it's a good experience and something that surprises and delights, that leads to loyalty. So there's consistency, but there's also that moment of unexpected delight. The delight part of it is an important part of the payoff. You can't surprise them in an unpleasant way.
Speaker 2:But if you put those two things together.
Speaker 1:That's what drives loyalty. And everybody focuses on discounts because they think that's what consumers want. And I will be the first to say consumers absolutely want their discounts, but that becomes a base level expectation. So if you really want to drive loyalty, a base level expectation, so if you really want to drive loyalty, how do you add that something extra to the equation that they were not expecting? That really, that's what cements loyalty, like emotional loyalty. And again, I think it's really hard to deliver that unexpected thing in a mass way, and that's where retailers get hung up on. How do you deliver this as part of the store experience? Because you can't just automate that.
Speaker 2:Right, right, well, because you probably have some idea who's doing this. Well, I mean even occasionally, because I don't know how you do that at scale correctly every time.
Speaker 1:but who does it well, I? I knew you were going to ask the question and I did spend some time thinking about it and even then still I'm like I don't. I don't know anybody who does it well. Like, when I think about the retailers that I love, I, I, I just have a really hard time putting my finger on anything Like there's not. There wasn't a specific moment when I said I love this retailer and and there wasn't. You know, there wasn't actually even anything particularly different about what they were doing.
Speaker 1:I just think they execute better. They get the consistency part right at a minimum and then have that opportunity to do more in other places. I mean, I haven't bought anything from them in years because my kids took all my furniture and moved out. But Ikea, as an example, was an experience that I love to have. I love walking through the store and I love even the checkout experience is okay. Sometimes the lines are long, but it's like if I need something in the housewares world, I'll go to Ikea first. They haven't done anything to chase me away from that perspective, but it's all execution. There's nothing special sauce about what they're doing.
Speaker 2:Well, other than Ikea? Well, it's not even a fair question, because you already said, it's really hard to come by. And I'm thinking as you're telling me about your Ikea experience, I'm running through my list of the retailers that I like to frequent and full disclosure none of them are because of their loyalty program.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I'm a firm believer in the value of a great loyalty program.
Speaker 1:Yeah, totally, totally yeah. There's no loyalty program that I love. That's a different question too, right, yeah, and that's the one we need another episode for.
Speaker 2:Yes, We'll tear everybody down. I was really intrigued by something that you put out there as part of your formula for high value in-store experiences and it's a bit controversial, I think. You state and these are my words, I'm paraphrasing, probably badly experiences should be delivered through in-store associates. It's a pretty broad statement and stated very matter-of-factly. Can you tell us what you mean by that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that you should not be thinking about store experiences in terms of how to get around the store associate, or you should not consider in-store experiences that do not include consideration of the store associate and the role that they ultimately will play in delivering that experience. Because even if you think like, oh, I'm going to put a kiosk in the store and it's going to be self-serve, so I don't need store associates aren't a part of this experience, I don't need to worry about them, I'm just going to have this kiosk. Well, when the kiosk doesn't work, who's the first person they turn to to ask like, hey, what's wrong with the kiosk store associates? So even when you think that you don't need the store associate as part of this experience, they end up a part of it. So you should always think about this through the lens of the store associate experience.
Speaker 1:And then the other side of it is people go to the store because store associates are there. Like if they didn't want at least the option to engage with a store associate, they would have just stayed home and gone online. So whether they use the store associate in that experience or not, they're going to the store to have the opportunity to have that help if they want it. So you must always be thinking about what role should that store associate be playing in this experience, as opposed to just trying to cut them out of it, because now you're eliminating the purpose of the visit to begin with.
Speaker 2:Right, you mentioned that and this was kind of like, you'll permit me, I felt like it was kind of duh. But me, unpack it, it's not so duh. Experiences should serve all stakeholders, and your stakeholders list includes retailers, associates and customers. I think it makes total sense there. As I was thinking about this, though, I thought, okay, finding that right balance. I mean, you have to please the people in the corner offices, you have to please your customers, because customer centricity would mean nothing otherwise. But I feel personally like the key, the linchpin to all of that is the employees, is your store associates. I mean, yeah, you're going to design a great program strategically and that's going to get the approval. You wouldn't be there if you didn't have approval from your C-suite or whoever. But making that work for the customer seems like it's it's it's all a function of the employee of the store. Am I looking at that right?
Speaker 1:I think so. But again it's back to if you don't even consider the store associate as part of the equation, then you're not going to have success, because I've seen too many things where the mobile device ends up in the drawer with the battery dead or the kiosk is unplugged and shoved into the corner out of the way because the store associates were like this is too much of a pain and I'm going to get rid of it. Your in-store experience lives or dies by the store associate, whether they're actively involved in that experience or not, because they're the ones that will direct customers to or away. They are the ones who have to support the technology, whether you mean them to or not. You always have to consider that store associate role.
Speaker 1:I have one great story there that I'll share, which is a department store who put in a perfume scent finder. So it was a kiosk. It was geared towards the consumer, not towards the store associates. So you, you, it was a kiosk. It was geared towards the consumer, not towards the store associates. So they didn't consider that part of the equation. But what they wanted and they actually put like alerts for the store associate was that once the customer got to a certain point that the store associate was supposed to step in and and help that customer. And if you got the alert and then you didn't respond in enough time, right, there was some measurement that was on there that was a little bit penalizing.
Speaker 1:So what would happen was a customer would walk up to the kiosk and start playing with it and a store associate would immediately come in so that it never got to the point where they had made a selection. And then you're like well, why did you try to go around the store associate in the first place? Like, wouldn't they have been the perfect medium to have that conversation? Oh, you like this floral scent? I've got three different perfumes. Let's go pull those out so you can take a look, Because you know that conversation is going to have to happen next. Anyway, right, it's thinking through it. I just find retailers don't think of a customer journey in the store as a sales journey led by a store associate, and so they don't give respect to that side of the journey that needs to be had, to be successful, back to that peak immersion or flow state.
Speaker 2:Well, really good point. I'm thinking about all of the technologies I saw demoed and talked about at NRF. I mean, it's just a ton of stuff and, frankly, I'm still processing it several months later. But look what our thing can do. And we're not here to eliminate jobs, we're here to support jobs. I mean, you have to say that right. This isn't about workforce reduction. On the other hand, nobody was really talking about the assistive aspects of the technology to help in-store associates. It really ended up being like look at our cool thing and how efficient we can make your operation slash bottom line. And so I wonder this kind of what I issue almost more than it is business processes.
Speaker 1:I mean, how do you navigate that issue? That cultural challenge does come out of kind of an inherent challenge of stores, which is ultimately there's the selling part of stores and then there's the operations part of stores. The operations part of stores is where all the cost is. So everybody again back to measures. Everybody focuses on the things that are easy to measure.
Speaker 1:So it's easy to lose sight of the relationship between well, you have to invest some costs in order to be able to capture the revenue that you're seeking, and so I do think sometimes it's just too reductionist, because there's lots of executives in the retail industry who started out in a store, who might have even started out in their retailer's store, and you would think that they wouldn't lose sight of those things. But even for I find more companies are kind of putting forward the whole, like every executive has to spend a week in a store every quarter kind of stuff. I do think they're trying to kind of re-immerse everybody into that part of the experience to say, hey, don't get so buried in the numbers that you lose touch, because ultimately retail and selling, there's an emotional part of it. You can't operationalize that out, you shouldn't. You should embrace it. You shouldn't be ignoring it.
Speaker 2:I want to be a fly on the wall as you navigate those conversations and I'm like, of course I never will be, but you know, you've probably had enough of them that you kind of know how to, how to kind of tee those things up. And I'm right there with you. I think every transaction is a human one at its core, whether it's, whether it's purely online, whether it's purely through a kiosk. There's still a human on at least one side of that. Somewhere in here there's a human. All right, let me just throw the big one out to you. This is the big one, all right. This is why people pay so much attention to my podcast, because I ask this question to people. All right is why people pay so much attention to my podcast, because I asked this question to people. You had to give retailers one piece of advice about in-store experiences. What would it be?
Speaker 1:Listen to your store associates as much as you listen to anybody else about what needs to happen in stores.
Speaker 1:And I say that but I also have to add a caveat to it. Right, Like, store associates don't have the field of vision that an executive has, so you can't expect them to be able to give you like here's the three things you need to do to revamp your customer experience in stores. They're not going to give you that, but they are going to give you. Here's all the stupid things that I have to trip over in order to be able to help a customer. You, here's all the stupid things that I have to trip over in order to be able to help a customer. And I think if we did spend much more focused time on how to get those barriers out of the way, then you don't even have to improve the customer experience. You will improve the customer experience by default, because that store associate will be much more capable of getting to that peak immersion that yields sales at the end of the day. Plus, they will have felt like capable of getting to that peak immersion that yields sales at the end of the day.
Speaker 2:Plus, they will have felt like somebody finally listened to them Listened, absolutely yeah which is interesting. Well, Nikki, I'm so glad we finally were able to schedule this. I think we've been trying to do this for a couple of months now, and the next version will probably take us another couple of months to schedule as well. But thanks for this. It's enlightening and it's always fun, and I can't wait till we do it again.
Speaker 1:My pleasure and anytime.
